Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kajillionaire’ on HBO Max, Starring Evan Rachel Wood as the Outcast Among a Family of Outcasts

Now on HBO Max after premiering in the fall of 2020 in theaters and on VOD, Kajillionaire marks the return of filmmaker Miranda July, nine years after The Future and 15 after her widely celebrated debut Me and You and Everyone We Know. Her tone and style are odd, peculiar and very much her own, the films strange and potentially off-putting until you recognize and acknowledge the emotions heaving and aching beneath the surface. Kajillionaire may be her most relatively star-studded, high-profile release yet, but one needn’t worry that her style has changed.

KAJILLIONAIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Some obscure operation is going on at the post office. Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins) stand pat at the adjacent bus stop. Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) somersaults and army-crawls toward the entrance like a black-ops soldier. She enters the post office, puts her key into a p.o. box, puts her hand into it, all the way in, to the other side, and nimbly burgles packages and envelopes from other boxes. They are the Dyne family — mother, father, daughter — and this is their most lucrative gig. They score a gift certificate for a free massage, a tie, a stuffed animal. Petty grifting — the pettiest, perhaps — is their life.

Yes, Old Dolio. That’s her real name. It was a piece of a job — Theresa and Robert named her after a homeless man, gambling that he’d put them in his will. Well, they gambled all right. Old Dolio speaks in an oddly phony dropped-octave drone, walks as if her mile-long hair pulls her into a permanent hunch, dresses as if she received hand-me-downs from a 6’8″ jogging enthusiast. She takes the massage certificate in, and complains that the masseuse is using too much pressure even though her hands hover two inches above her shoulders. They live in some office space beneath Bubbles Inc. for $500 a month. Once a day, they have to rush back to the room to capture the pink foam that floods from the ceiling down the wall. At least it leaks on a schedule, their landlord says. They’re three months behind on rent, so every time they walk by the half-wall in front of the plant, they crouch so they won’t be seen, Old Dolio limboing beneath the line, fully bent over backwards.

What the hell is wrong with these people? We find out when they reluctantly meet Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a perky type who strikes up a conversation with Robert on an airplane. The Dynes took the flight to New York after Old Dolio won the tickets in a sweepstakes and concocted a luggage-insurance scam that’d net them $1,575, of course. Curious and probably bored with her life as an opotometrist’s assistant, Melanie nudges her way into their schemes, and realizes how weird and sad these people are, especially Old Dolio, who for 26 years has been criminally undernurtured by her parents. Meanwhile, earthquakes keep rattling them. Could this be “the big one”? Possibly. They’re in Los Angeles.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Kajillionaire boasts similar tones to Charlie Kaufmanesque surrealist metaphors, where things are strange for a reason, not just for strangeness’ sake. Think Anomalisa or I’m Thinking of Ending Things, with the bleakness dialed back a bit.

Performance Worth Watching: As the normie in this roomful of weirdos, Rodriguez hits the perfect comedio-dramatic performance notes to contextualize the Dynes’ dysfunction — and be a convincing catalyst for change.

Memorable Dialogue: “Isn’t that amazing? Old Dolio learned to forge before she learned to write. Actually, that’s how she did learn to write.” — Robert

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Who the hell are these characters? Or maybe more accurately, what the hell are they? Chimerical exaggerations of difficult-to-describe feelings of yearning, loneliness and other deep psychosomatic aches? The Dynes appear to be off-the-gridders with a low-key seething disdain for mainstream society. They’ve been in a pragmatic hand-to-mouth rut for so long, they’re cynical and miserable and they’ve forgotten how to love, it seems, if they ever knew. Old Dolio bears the brunt of this, starting with that name, which she wears like a saddle. She’s a confused bundle of anti-emotions, and despite Wood’s committed performance, remains an obscurity for most of the film. But neither will we forget that heavily mannered abstraction-beings deserve love too — and there’s always a possibility that they may come into more recognizable focus.

There’s a terrific scene in Kajillionaire where the Dynes and Melanie pantomime being a real family as part of a grift, and I think they might actually enjoy it. There’s more to the scene that I won’t reveal, but it’s poignant and evasive, like life so often is, and it transcends the arm’s-lengthiness of our relationship with the Dynes, pushing beyond the surreal to something that feels like the truth. It takes roughly half the movie to get to this point — prior to that, it’s too self-consciously odd, but after, it builds to something extraordinary, dramatically tiptoeing along the precipice of despair until, I’m happy to report, it ultimately, cleverly becomes a story of hope and optimism.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kajillionaire‘s unapologetic idiosyncrasy means your mileage may vary. But for me, it was a rumination on the complexities of parent-child relationships, on nurture, on how voids, once recognized, can always be filled.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Kajillionaire